


Emotional Manslaughter

by superbunny



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Multi, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-19 06:14:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13698525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superbunny/pseuds/superbunny
Summary: This is a story about two people, featuring some other people who unfortunately think this story is also about them. These people are not nice people. They don't do nice things, and they definitely don't talk nicely, or spend much time considering the effects of their actions.Collateral damage, you see, is the spice of life.(This story contains the type of language that you'd expect of people who think they're the most important people in the world, and might be right about that. There will be allusions to and potentially depictions of sex, and there will definitely be depictions of violence, though probably not graphic.





	1. Roadkill

“What would you wish for now, if you could use the Dragon Balls?”

They must be around 19. He’s sitting shotgun in her car in the parking lot of the Drake and Blaster’s. He knows by then that her original wish had been to get a boyfriend. He’s still pretty much useless with women, besides her, and if he’s honest, he can’t say he cares anymore. Bulma is beautiful, hilarious, and probably the smartest person in the world, and when she wants to be, which is a good half of the time, she’s his girlfriend.

He’s probably in love with her.

It’s pretty clear she’s not in love with him.

She likes him, sure, but he wonders if she’s just being practical. She’s talked to him about kids, They’ve broken up twice for every year they’ve been together, and he knows she’s tried it with other people. Her fuse is too short and she’d rather put the effort into her _actual_ work than into making a relationship work. With him, she says, there is no work. He’s just there, and they do all the things couples do, until she gets bored of him, tells him so, and finds a bikini model to hook up with, then spends a month in the lab working on a new design.

“Any normal person would have booked it by now,” she tells him, laughing, and it’s probably as emphatic a confession as he gets from her. She’s never looked at him with the desire that she has in her eyes when she’s testing a new blaster on a slab of meat. She’s never mooned over him the way she does over her modified high speed hovercar. Maybe she just doesn’t love like he does. Maybe she’s just on some other level, beyond his petty human concerns.

He’s okay with that, he tells himself.

Still, he wonders what she really wants. He wonders if she even _knows_ what she really wants, and if he can really give it to her.  
  
Bulma appears to consider the question for a moment. “I think I’d wish for my own army.”  
  
He’s taken aback. He knows she’s dealt with paramilitaries before. That was probably the last time he’d seen genuine fear on her face.  
  
“To defend the Earth, I mean. Armed with the best superweapons. Answering to me,” she clarifies, but the lust in her voice grows exponentially with each detail. “It seems like fun.”  
  
“That’s kind of scary, Bulma.”  
  
“Maybe I like being scary, Yamcha.”

He doesn’t bring it up again.

-  
  
A good five or six breakups later, they’re safely in their mid twenties, back in that same parking lot. Bulma’s reading something on her C-tab; Yamcha’s watching her expressions.

“Ugh, Yam, can you believe these hacks? Apparently I smoke too much to be a good role model for kids.”

“Are you _trying_ t—”

“You’re not listening to me! Last week I was too young and untested to be CTO, and now I’m too old to be driving in sideshows? Please, _unfocused?_ How many MScs does this journalist bitch have? Oh, I’ll show you _abrasive and undiplomatic._ ”

“They’re just trying to g—”

“Shh, I’m reading her bio. Looks like she lives in East West City...” Bulma scrolls down for another minute, then her face suddenly hardens with resolve. “Yamcha, I need you to kill this asshat.”

“What? I don’t kill people! I’ve never ki—”

“You’re too _nice_ ,” she says, pouting. “It’s infuriating. ”

“You can’t kill people for being assholes.”

“No, I can’t. But you can.”

“No, I mean— people don’t deserve to die just for being mean to you.”

“Uh, _fuck yes_ , they do! And you know what, if you weren’t such a fucking _pussy,_ maybepeople wouldn’t make fun of you, either.”

“Who do you hear making fun of me?”

“Well, mainly me, but… you know what I mean!”

He sighs. "Bulma... maybe the problem is _you.”_

He walks away from her, away from where the car is parked, towards nowhere in particular. She was his ride, and he’s got no money on him for the taxi. She chases after him and throws her smoothie onto his head.  
  
“Fuck you!”

“I don’t know why you’re expecting people to act like you’re some gracious princess! You barely care about this fucking planet! You’d probably blow it all to pieces to look at the explosion, if it didn’t inconvenience you!”  
  
“You can’t even do long division, Yamcha. Who the fuck cares what some desert rat thinks?”

He starts to turn red, which she must see, because she lets out a high-pitched laugh.

“You could be somebody, Yamcha. You could win the tournament, even, if you just – stopped caring. Stopped comparing yourself and trying to follow some goody-two-shoes example. I'm the most successful person in the damn world, and it's because I don't follow anyone. I don't have heroes. And I certainly wouldn't let people insult me if I could snap any regular asshole's neck with some magic punch.”  
  
Yamcha stops walking and turns around.

"Yeah, okay. So, what, you want me to kill you for saying I'm a worthless idiot?"

"It'd be nice if you tried!" She huffs and crosses her arms. "I mean, it's like you just take whatever bullshit I throw at you!"

"Yeah, Bulma. Because I  _like_ you. And I don't actually think you're some heartless monster like you  _want_ me to think you are. I get that it's frustrating or whatever, all the people you have to deal with, so I just let you because I have enough self-esteem to take it, which maybe you  _don't actually have,_ since you respond to every nobody with a worthless take on you by graphically fantasizing about eviscerating them. Which you never do, even though you've invented the most terrifying chemical weapons and firearms I could ever even imagine, leading me to believe that either, A, you're a coward, which I know you aren't because you walk up to any fucking monster like they're the mailman, or B, you're actually a moral person who doesn't believe her reputation matters more than other people's lives."

He's never heard her this silent in the entire time they've been together. The look on her face somehow reminds him of a frozen computer, and he feels like he can hear the gears in the machine half of her brain turning. In the corner of her eye, if he didn't know better, he'd think he saw a tear forming. Then her lip turns, and Yamcha's eyes go right to her left hip.

Out of her twisted mouth comes a laugh, in a voice he's never heard before: lower, less affected, colder, more serious, and though it's completely new to him, it sounds so much more like _her_ than anything that's come before it. It's like for once in her life, she's being honest, and if he didn't know her, he'd run. He wants to run even more  _because_ he knows her, but he's spending too much energy processing the image that results when he places this final piece of the puzzle he hadn't even known he'd been trying to solve for the past ten years.

"Or, maybe, Yamcha," Bulma says, stepping forwards, somehow closer to him than she's ever been, "I'd just rather have  _someone else_ stuck with the murder charge."

-

From the backseat of her car, helplessly being driven by this strange and familiar woman to his ugly uptown loft, Yamcha manages his bravest words:

"I think... from now on... we should just be friends."


	2. Deserts, Desertion, and Definitely No Desserts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dinner for three on WTO station-base #3295.

_**MEANWHILE...** _

“Man, we better get assigned somewhere soon,” Raditz grumbles, poking his utilitensil into the grey, semi-gelatinous bean-shaped monolith that is the Official Ready-to-Eat Sustenance Object. “Raw bug people meat is better than whatever the fuck this is, right Vegeta?” He turns to his right, looking down at the prince with a very unsubtle wink.

Vegeta turns his basic scowl up a couple of notches. “Just eat your fucking food, so we don’t all have to listen to your undisciplined peasant stomach all night.” 

The prince’s plate is already empty. Raditz has a theory that Vegeta’s ‘stomach discipline’ also involves turning off his taste buds somehow, because he always eats the goop the fastest, almost as if it were something with a flavor other than despair and cost-efficiency.

Nappa clears his throat. “Boys.”

“We’re _adults_ , Nappa,” Raditz protests.

“ _Boys_ , I have a comment.”

Vegeta rolls his eyes, audibly, somehow. “Oh, gods above, _Nappa_ has a _comment._ This is surely a moment for the history books. _”_

“I have been thinking.”

Vegeta snorts. “ _That_ I find spurious.”

“I have been thinking… about the future. Your royal—“ The prince glares. “—Vegeta, you’re nearing the end of your third decade. Were our homeworld still in existence,” (he signs something best expressed verbally as ‘may it be avenged one-hundredfold’) “you’d have at least one heir by now.”

Nappa pauses, as if trying to gauge the prince’s likelihood to attack, but instead finds his former ward looking bashfully down at the table, his ruddy brown skin covered with a light blush. Raditz is grinning like an idiot. “My prince, I think you should consider potential mating prospects.”

Vegeta’s forehead is pressed to the table. If Raditz could read minds, he’s fairly sure he’d see in the prince’s head a series of gleefully vibrant images involving Nappa meeting increasingly gruesome and humiliating fates. The tiny common area between the three sleeping rooms they’ve been _so generously_ allotted feels as if it’s been turned into a large trash compactor.

“That was very… dipl… art… You used nice words, there, Nappa,” offers Raditz in a desperate attempt to fill the ominous silence as Vegeta charges up what will surely be a top-notch freakout.

“Thank you, Raditz. I’ve been planning that out. Also, unlike you, I read.”

Vegeta begins to rise again, rubbing his temples menacingly.

“Hey, Naps, I can read! Books are just… boring. I prefer training my brain with holo-games, is all.”

“That regimen doesn’t look like it’s getting results.”

Vegeta interrupts them with a very deep and very loud breath. “WHAT. THE. FUCK, NAPPA?” The air in the stuffy room seems to turn icy. “WHAT. THE. EVER-LOVING, TAP DANCING,  _LEGENDARY SUPER-SAIYAN_ _FUCK_ ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

Nappa is a giant man. Saiyans come in a great variety of sizes (though the vast majority, if he remembers correctly, were much larger than Vegeta), but he is large. He attempts, quite humorously, to shrink in submission. It barely works.

“I just meant, you know, the future of our—“

Raditz giggles at the color Vegeta’s turning. He almost looks like Jeice. Fortunately, the prince can’t seem to hear him over his own rage.

“FUCK YOU, NAPPA! YOU’RE A FUCKING GUARD, NOT AN ADVISER!”

Nappa says nothing, in hopes that Vegeta might cool to a simmer. He does.

Sort of.

The quieter fury is almost worse.

“I cannot _believe..._ you would have the _nerve_ , the sheer _gumption_ , ...the absolute _lack of will to live_ it requires to motivate you to make a fucking _comment_ on my  _sex life.”_

“Oh _please_. I’m not talking about you getting laid. You have your outpost bathroom hookups and whatever the fuck you have with Ditzy here—“ Nappa gestures to the 30-year-old man currently making the face of a toddler who’s just heard mention of bodily waste.

“It’s called an _affair,_  Nappa.”

Vegeta stands up, his fists balling against the table. “I AM NOT HAVING A FUCKING _AFFAIR_ WITH YOU, RADITZ!” They’re gonna get their allowance docked for those dents. “I _knew_ you'd get us found out! They probably could hear you on  fucking _Bespin!_ ”

Raditz’s smile fades as he processes the prince’s words. “So… what… what are we?”

Vegeta just glares at Raditz, then stomps into his room. It's not nearly as dramatically effective as it would have been three months ago, when he could have stomped out of the actual mess hall— back before _someone_ strangled a server to death, resulting in a lifetime ban of all Saiyans from World Trade dining areas.

"My dear, lovesick idiot," Nappa offers with something approaching  reaches across the table and places his hand on Raditz’s shoulder. "You’re merely sex associates.”

“What is _that_?”

“Co-workers who fuck sometimes. And you’ve gone and let yourself get delusions of emotional grandeur.”

“I’m not... I don’t have dilutions,” Raditz huffs, dejected.

“You convinced yourself you could mean something to him. You won’t. Trust me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was in love, once, believe it or not.”

“I choose not. Please don’t tell me.”

“Me and the king, no less. That man… so much passion. So much fire. A goddamn gladiator in the arena of boinking.”

Raditz stares. “Vegeta’s  _dad?”_

“Your dad was doing him too,” Nappa adds, a nostalgic sparkle in his eyes.

“ _My_ dad?”

“Gods, is our culture really fading that fast?”

“Our _dads?”_

“I knew we weren’t gonna get our tails tied or anything, but man, was that man beautiful. And I thought… I thought he enjoyed my company.”

“Nappa, _our dads?”_

“See, that’s the thing about royalty. You can never be good enough for them. They’re always better than you, stronger than you, smarter than you. They don’t fall in love. I don’t think they even feel it. It’s just about getting off for them.”

“Our… dads…”

“So he sold me off as an accessory for his spoiled brat, in exchange for protection from Frieza, or whatever the fuck.” Nappa looks over his shoulder, as if he had a chance of dodging said brat’s retaliation, had he heard that remark. “I honestly don’t know how you got to be part of that. Something about your dad having a weird fungus juice trip or something.”

“ _Dads_.”

“Yeah, your dad… I guess he knew something. He’d do anything to get you and your brother away from the planet.”

“Dad… wait…”

“So anyway, I got this contact in IT, traded some booze for a scan database of planets not scheduled to be purged, looking for ones with species classified as mammalian… I was thinking, if the whole you-know-what ends up working and our boy’s not just full of shit as usual, the royal line could continue with some chick from one of these… Hybrids aren’t that rare, you know. Vegeta’s great grandma was a Tuffle.”

“My… my brother…”

“Oh, right! Yeah, I saw something - it’s not scheduled because it was so full of low power levels that it’s just assumed purged, but there’s a lead on Karkat or whatever… your brother.”

“Kakarot!”

“Yeah. Once you piece your brain back together we can see if there’s a way we can check it out. There’s some planets in that system that might have some value, I don’t know…”

“I’m gonna hijack a pod.”

“No you aren’t.”

“I’m going there. Tonight. Tomorrow. I don’t know if it’s day or night right now, you know what I mean.”

“Raditz, you’re confused. You’re just trying to distract yourself from your feelings for the prince. The place has to be cleared by now, your brother would be long gone. If you take a pod you’ll get disciplinary action, or worse, Frieza will just leave you there… and I’m not gonna come get your sorry ass, that’s not my job.”

“I have to, Nappa.”

“Vegeta’s got a brother out there, too, you know. You don’t see him dropping everything to go find him.”

“Vegeta doesn’t care about people. I’m not him. I have to go, Nappa.”

“Well, also, the kid’s probably dead, but… come on, what if Vegeta really does it? He’ll blast your ass for deserting. I mean literally, in a violence way. He’d kill you dead.”

“He’d kill both of us dead ten times a day if this station wasn’t ki-dampened, Nappa.”

Nappa sighs. “You’re probably right.”

“I have to do something that means something, Nappa.”

“You know what? You’re an adult. I won’t stop you. Nobody around here gets paid enough to stop you. I just… I know it’s not my job, but I kinda care what happens to you.”

“He’s my fucking family, Nappa.”

“I thought _we_ were your family.”

“Gross.”

“You know what I mean!”

“I really don’t. Vegeta thinks I’m a worthless idiot who’s useful occasionally for sex. You think I’m a slightly lovable idiot. Vegeta’s probably closer to the truth. If I find my brother…”

“What, your life will mean something?”

“Yeah.”

“None of our lives mean anything. We’re a bunch of glorified living wrecking balls working for a bunch of ugly reptiles. A hundred generations of empire were erased in a day. We’re just waiting for the only one of us with any _actual_ skills to get strong enough to free us so we can be wrecking balls with health benefits and vacation time. We still won’t have a home. We still won’t ever see our parents again.” Nappa runs his hand over his scalp the way he would if he still had hair. “Finding your brother won’t change shit, Raditz.”

“You’re probably right,” Raditz replies, “but it’s not like I have anything better to do.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME: Heartwarming reunions! Fated meetings! Love at first sight!
> 
> Actually, none of that! Thank fucking god!


End file.
